Life is just a chance to grow a soul

Memorable Class Highlight: When Joseph took that secret pic of virgil and posted it to his blog immediately

Preferred Medium Before Course: video & photoshop, mainly because i get it the most & have to most practice there

Preferred Medium After Course: i really want to design this website now!

A Topic I Would Like to Investigate: actual web design, i write & edit a lot for the web now but i wanted to understand behind the scenes, like all the stuff we learned about in this class. I'm going to just have to keep on practicing because that's clearly the best way to learn any program!

Something I learned in this Class (non technical): Patience is a virtue, you can find a lot great, cool programs to help for free online

Something  I learned (technical):  All the flash stuff, although I'm still totally overwhelmed! It makes me feel better to really understand how photoshop is the basis of all of these more complicated ones though.

Something I will try to do next semester...: Push forward with the website design I started here!

Something I will try to do everyday...: Practice Wabi Sabi!

If I had 150 Million:  I would make a big budget film about this heist that happened in my town in 1981 where they stole 7 million dollars!

With 15 bucks...: Do a dramatic recreation of the same incident with my friends and post it right here!

This is my web design concept for a friends media production company. He does urban, lifestyle content for TV and a lot of viral & documentary projects so we divided his content by those categories. It's all video so we included a player on the homepage that would feature a rotating selection of projects &/or previews. The piece in there now is from a video he did about the Tat's Cru. I would definitely want movement on this page. The theme is the name of the company essentially, Selva (meaning jungle in Spanish) mixed with the urban elements of the city. I would want the flowers to bloom when you click on the menu options and the sound to be like jungle noises mixed with the sound of trains coming into the stations (there's totally a theme of trains in all my stuff, hmmm). The train at the top of the page could move too. But what I really want to be able to flash animate is vines coming up from the background and wrapping themselves around the buildings in the skyline. I'd like to add something else too the buttons as well so it's not just a white blocked out space. I totally feel like this is probably way to busy too, I just started having a lot of fun with the theme and layering all the elements. Maybe if I could get all the other stuff going on I'd take the big ceiba tree out of the background of the page.

These are the designs I handed in for the portfolio. The first 2 are photo collages I'm attaching below:

This is my kind of final version of the short video assignment. After watching Sans Soleil I decided to go ahead and add a narrative to the video, but I didn't want to do something literal or explanatory, I wanted it to be more abstract. The interviews I had wouldn't have worked in so short of a time frame so I decided to use a poem from one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda. What I wound up with is a love song, so from a project that was started off with an idea of sadness and melancholy turned into something kind of happy. It was cool to see how much the most minor editing tweaks and sound changes could morph the entire feeling and narrative of a piece...so here it is:

OK, so I've been MIA for a minute and had all these grand designs of making a short film that would be a meditation on loss and memory and melancholy and all of the feelings I've allowed myself to indulge in as of late. But then I started looking through videos, lots and lots and hours and hours of videos I had shot with friends, family and loved ones over the years. Mostly of places I've traveled and lived and gotten to know people. One of these places was Guatemala. I've always had this footage, my partner and I have been obsessed with documenting things, from mundane to extraordinary for quite a while. My first passion was photography...

In Guatemala, this meditation on memory and loss was no more pertinent any more in my life now than it was while I was living in this country that time and history has forgotten. A civil war ripped through this country for more than 50 years, spurred on by the American supported CIA led coup of a Democratically elected president in 1954. We arrived in 2002, just 5 years after a formal cease fire had been reached but only 2 to 3 years after really violent activity had at least become sporadic.

We met people from all walks of life, rich, poor, Mestizo, Indigena, White, Expat, Spaniard, formally educated, campesino... but the most startling contrast was of what people coming from different social classes remembered of the Civil War. Those lucky enough to have been sheltered and confined in  compounds of formal educational institutions and having no real memories of impact through the years versus those living in the country, watching entire villages burnt down and generations of collective memory extinguished. I got captivated by this footage and want to work with it to create some kind of narrative that threads through from the origins of the civilizations here to the beauty and ruins left of the country and it's people today.

This is what I have so far...